Pinkie

It seemed like a story you’d read in a Beverly Cleary novel or The Reader’s Digest… and yet it was such a Meneses thing to happen.

On our way back home from dropping off one of my kid’s friends, coming through a residential neighborhood, I was just doing my due diligence when I stopped for a lost dog. A slender yellow lab/retriever mix, I knew she was lost when I watched her wander from yard to yard looking for food scraps around the trash cans. Yet a red collar and black shock collar side by side told me she surely had a home. She was thin but not too too thin and had a nice coat, she couldn’t have been out for too long.

She let me come right up to her to check for tags. I expected this encounter to end like all the other times I stopped for dogs- check the tags, call the owner, stand on the street holding lost dog til owner comes to retrieve. A simple courtesy from one dog owner to the next, the same courtesy that had been done for me when my beagle hound mix “Emma” took off to adventure. But this pup didn’t have any tags. No sharpie phone number on the collar either.

As I stood there trying to determine my next move, she jumped into the open door of my mini van. “Well okay then.” My then 9 and 12 year olds were of course all the wiggles with excitement- “Are we gonna keep her?”

“No, no, no…” I assured them… “She clearly belongs to someone… we just need to find her owner.”

“What are we going to tell Daddy?”

“You guys let me handle that… In fact, when we get home, why don’t you guys just hang in the car for a minute with the dog?… I’ll go inside and talk to Daddy first.”

And so the conversation started with “Hey babe, how was work?” And ended with, “It will only be a few hours… 3 days tops. She’ll be gone by Wednesday. This dog has an owner… I just need to find it.” And though I vowed to keep her outside, not knowing what ailments she might carry and not wanting to expose her to our healthy dog, cat and rabbit inside… within an hour, that street dog had scratched the back door enough to work her way in the house… and on my bed.

For a solid month we contacted every dog rescue site, posted on every social media outlet, took her to local vets to get scanned and hopefully ID’d, even walked the neighborhood we found her in to ask the locals if they knew who she belonged to, telling the young dog “Take me home baby…” all to no avail. In that process, we learned that the neighborhood we found her in was a popular spot to dump dogs- right on the county/city line. And the dog that appeared to be so well taken care of, perhaps wasn’t quite so. Besides being a bit underweight, she wasn’t spayed, had a build up of scar tissue in her ears from chronic ear infections as a puppy, and a bb embedded in her shoulder from being shot. One of her breasts had a mass in it- about the size of a ping pong ball and the vet surmised that it “didn’t look good.” Perhaps it was that tumor that was the reason for her being dumped?

Nonetheless, it would be a costly procedure to remove the mass and the pathology may reveal a poor prognosis for the dog we’d only just begun to know. A procedure, no shelter would likely invest in. With local shelters already over capacity, we knew this adult dog, found on the streets of Baltimore, wouldn’t stand a chance in the shelters. And despite the fact that we never planned to have a second dog and my begrudged husband was still quoting me… “No more than 3 days… you said”, neither of us were willing to send her to a probable death. Under the guidance of our vet, we decided to get to know this dog a little better before we made any big decisions.

During the first few weeks we had her, we noticed she had an unusual trait- a pink nose, instead of black. One day while I was home alone, I thought to myself, “‘Pinkie’ would be a good name for her, if she stayed.” That same afternoon, my husband came home and casually said ” You know I was thinking… ‘Pinkie’ would be a good name for her…. not that we’re keeping her though. We’re not keeping her!” And then he asked if I’d gotten any responses to my posts, had any luck finding her a home. And he shook his head and walked away. I knew then, that the universe had spoken. Now just to win over my husband.

City law stated that after 30 days of a lost dog being in your possession, you assumed ownership of that dog. That February, “Pinkie” became ours.

But her story had only just begun.

It seemed our first 30 days was a bit of a honeymoon. While she got along beautifully with the cat and rabbit, a welcome change from our prey-driven hound who took great efforts to teach not to eat the small family pets, Pinkie asserted herself elsewhere and declared herself alpha over our 7 year old dog Emma. And it was hard to watch and tolerate. Emma, who had always slept on the floor next to my side of the bed, was suddenly being cast out of the bedroom- tail between her legs and head down, with a single glance from Pinkie. Pinkie ate first. Pinkie was calling the shots. And though we tried initially to intervene and to empower our OG Emma…. we soon realized this process was not ours to control. Emma had submitted.

And with this power gain, Pinkie started to assert her dominance over us people folk too. While on the ground- she behaved well. But she had become quite comfortable on our beds ( a privilege Emma had always been denied) and in that position she would declare herself the dictator. If any one of us humans, approached the bed she was lying on, she would snarl and snap. She did it to me when I approached my daughter’s bed, while she and Pinkie snuggled. And she did it to my husband when he approached our bed and Pinkie lie with me post night shift. That moment was a memorable one in our marriage. My docile husband shot me eyes that could kill, pointed at the dog and said “Fix your dog!” I thought for sure I was about to be sleeping in a tent in the back yard. We still joke, all these years later, that that dog almost ended our marriage.

It wasn’t just in our house that she tried to take control, either. On walks, she tried to bite the head off of every dog she encountered. It was like she was trying to prove something, like her loss of control turned into a desperate attempt to regain control in a quite unsavory way. Perhaps she had been fighting for longer than we first realized.

I turned to my beloved vet for guidance. “If you don’t fix this”, she said, “she’s gonna get put down. No shelter, no home, will tolerate this type of behavior. You got to regain dominance.” “No more beds”, she said. She explained that the elevated position, brings them closer to our eye level, and for some dogs, gives them an unhealthy sense of power. “Make her work for everything”- “Don’t pet her, don’t feed her, until she works for it. Give her commands, then reward her when she follows them.”

To make matters worse, when we took her to the local city clinic to be spayed- she had a horrific hormonal reaction (either a fantom pregnancy or a real one that was ended when they spayed her). The night after her surgery, her breasts filled with milk and dripped all over the floors. She began collecting the cat’s toys under our bed- treating it as her den and them as her babies, becoming aggressive if we reached under the bed. The clinic that we used was a public service- perfect for us as we weren’t financially prepared to take on a second dog. Fifty bucks to spay/neuter, micro chip and vaccinate. But their service ends when they hand you your sleepy dog and a bottle of pain medicine. If you have any problems, call your vet.

So I did… again. Warm compresses to her aching and leaking breasts. And “take away the cat toys”, we were instructed, to end her delusion. It broke all of our hearts when she whined and searched the closets and pulled the cushions off the couches, looking for her “babies”. It was a long couple of days.

Day by day. One challenge to the next, I worked with my dog. Her hormones settled. She settled. She and Emma found their groove and could be found lying side by side. She fell in line with us humans beautifully… so beautifully in fact, people who came to know her just a few months later, couldn’t believe the stories we told. She was calm, obedient, snuggly and followed me everywhere I went. I tell it now that – She just needed to work the streets out of her. Once she realized that she didn’t need to fight anymore to survive, that she was safe… that we were there to love and protect and care for her, she submitted.

She even won over my husband. One Father’s Day we gave him a coffee mug with pictures of the two of them on it and words that read- “There’s no love like the love of a Dad and the dog he didn’t want.” It was true.

Once we had a well adjusted dog, we moved forward with her doggie mastectomy.

I was never more grateful for my nursing skills when she came home with a drain and stitches and had to be sedated for 2 weeks to recover. It was another full time job caring for this ever-involved pup. And quite the work and expense, not knowing if it was all going to end in a devastating diagnosis after all.

Though her tissue “didn’t look good” when they opened her up, her pathology studies came back good- clean margins and no metastatic cancer! The hard work and chance paid off!

One man’s trash became another man’s treasure. From then on, she was the best damn dog!

She never went after the cat, rabbit, chickens or any of the other small pets. In fact, marching us out to the chicken coup twice a day was her favorite “chore.” She never got into the trash or chewed; though she’d take any scrap you offered her- never the picky eater. She only ever barked if someone approached the front door… and then she’d start wagging her tail.

She was fiercely loyal. I couldn’t get up and move from one couch to the next, without her getting up to follow me- even when her hips could hardly stand. When Emma would seize the opportunity to dart though the open gate, Pinkie always stayed behind. We used to joke that their dialogue would include Emma trying to convince Pinkie to come along- “Come on! We’ll come back at 2am. I promise you… I do it all the time! I go off, have a great adventure and come back in the middle of the night, scratch at the door and they let me back in.” Surely, we imagined Pinkie would respond “Uh uh… nope… I’ve been out there. I know what it’s like. These people are good to me… I ain’t taking no chances. You go ahead. I’m staying right here.” And sure enough, Emma would take off and Pinkie would stand on the porch watching her run.

She was sweet and snuggly. The kids forever had their limbs wrapped around her. Her soft coat was a welcome change from our hound’s stinky, wiry one. But boy did she shed!

She was a people dog. And she was particularly in-tune to those who needed love and security. Though Pinkie’s days on OUR beds ended with her obedience regimen and she found her new spot alongside Emma on the floor beside my bed. Each time we got a new foster child, even our first “unofficial” foster, she left my side and climbed into their bed with them on their first night. It was as though she knew what it felt like to be lost and scared and she could sense that in them.

Pinkie came to us when Emma first began to show signs of illness. I thought she would be our salve when Emma passed. And I guess she still was. But I thought we’d have more time with her. It’s hard to age an adult dog you find on the streets. Though they had a bit of a rough start, Pinkie bonded tremedously to Emma and her loyalty to her was evident until the end. Pinkie tended to Emma and checked up on her when she began to fail. When Emma was slow and could no longer lift her paw to scratch the door, Pinkie would wait for her and scratch for her. Pinkie declined rapidly after Emma died, just a year and a half ago.

A few days shy of 7 years, we relieved Pinkie of her suffering. A few licks of strawberry ice cream and she eased into my lap to close her eyes for the last time- our beloved vet and the whole family gathered in our living room. “Wednesday never came”, we said.

When I recall the story of how we met- the street dog that became my loyal companion, it occurred to me that the fractured fairytale fits our model so perfectly- hard work, resilience, patience and persistence, second chances, and above all else, love. Love truly conquers all.

I loved that dog more than any animal I have ever owned… but like all dogs seem to do, she loved us better. So much better.